Shakspeare and Dante are Saints of Poetry; really, if we will think of it, canonized, so that it is impiety to meddle with them. The unguided instinct of the world, working across all these perverse impediments, has arrived at such result. Dante and Shakspeare are a peculiar Two. They dwell apart, in a kind of royal solitude; none equal, none second to them: in the general feeling of the world, a certain transcendentalism, a glory as of complete perfection, invests these two. They are canonized, though no Pope or Cardinals took hand in doing it! Such, in spite of every perverting influence, in the most unheroic times, is still our indestructible reverence for heroism.
I've never understood the Dante hype. He's okay, but not on par with Shakespeare or Milton.
>>25195856Have you read him in Italian?
>>25195820Shakespeare is what I’d call a true poet, Dante merely a remarkable verse-craftsman.
>>25195878Paradise Lost > Hamlet > Divine ComedyThat’s my opinion, though they’re interchangeable. They really are the peaks.Don’t underrate Dante like that though! I’d place him above all the other great poets, not alongside them.
>>25195896The effect of Paradise Lost on sensitive readers is, of course, over-powering. But is the function of poetry to overpower? To be over-powered is to accept spiritual defeat. Shakespeare never overpowers: he raises up.
>>25195878Lumping Dante in with Virgil and Milton as examples of academic classicism is beyond moronic. Dante is thoroughly medieval, the highest flowering of that whole troubadour tradition. His landscapes and characters are human, fantastical and fascinating. There's nothing 'dry' about him. I cannot stress just how stupid it is to apply Johnson's stricture to Dante. If you don't have any serious first hand knowledge of Dante, parroting someone else's opinion doesn't make up for that. Stop posting that image every time Dante is mentioned.
>>25195925The function of Milton’s poetry in itself may very well be that to overpower, as you say. I think he masters it and for me, this is preferable, because for me, it’s almost like an endurance test, of withstanding awe, as it were. But yes, there is something universal and accessible about Shakespeare that reaches your soul with greater ease than any antecedent poets and any subsequent. I was reading Hamlet again recently, and I, like the autist I am, created faces, voices and spaces for the characters, as opposed to just watching or listening to a production. I feel like i appreciate it more as a result now, because it’s as though you embody his characters, their plights, our hero’s perceived madness, anger, sorrow, dilemma and as a result, you can understand the man behind it all a little better. And I feel my experience here has done enough to serve as proof of Shakespeare’s immortality This all sounds really pretentious and gay, I know. But I do feel Shakespeare is better on the page than on the stage.>>25195930Agreed, though I haven’t yet read him in Italian as I don’t speak the language, I feel the argument those make against him, that he’s “dry” would become even more asinine were I to experience it the way it was originally written. I feel reading most poetry in translation doesn’t really do it justice, and with Dante, less so.
>>25195930Don’t think I have posted it in relation to Dante before, only Homer. By your leave, I’ll quote someone else: Shelley said Dante (and Milton) were both deeply penetrated with the civilised world. I think he called him the first religious reformer too. He’s one of those great missionaries the Italians send to themselves to tell them they are crass, gross, lost, dead, mad and addicted to unnatural vice. Dante is best left on his pinnacle, inspiring, unapproachable and unread.
Doesn’t really matter, none of them could ever hope to match McCarthy in sheer quality.
>>25195896>>25195925I gotta ask, do you people actually understand Paradise Lost or are you pretending to sound smart? It's complete nonsense to me and I've read a lot of books.
>>25195878>the infernoWho's that midwit?Anyway, the "Shakespeare is true to life" nonsense has already been refuted by Tolstoy. He's actually highly artificial and the authors he steals from are actually truer and more natural.
>>25196044paradise lost is some cool fiction set in aquinas world for us to get a sense of what aquinas world is like, certainly cooler than dantes tedious look at whats in the afterlife or inquisitor rippergers praeternatural horror stories about the 5 daemon generals of sodomy. e michael jones says america is satanist in the sense of paradise lost
Njegoš is on par. As is Milton.
Honestly the best norse sagas hold up to the best of shakespeare or homer
>>25195856that's how i feel about shakespeare
>>25195867NTA but those who praise him to the heights typically don‘t. I don‘t think it‘s a translation issue. Notably I haven‘t read anything near his entirety in Italian but the passages I have parsed didn‘t overly impress me on a poetic level.
>>25195867Let's say you know Latin, can you understand the original Divine Comedy?
The thing is, I don’t like comedies. Happy endings suck because the world is dark and evil and shit and tragedies are really fucking cool because they speak to me with how dark and stuff they are
I wear my sunglasses at night type shit
this thread:>he's great>he's genius>he's overratedblah blah blah
>>25198262>he thinks
>>25197149Have you tried not being a mental pubescent? The posts on /lit/ are getting dumber and dumber...
>>25197143I don't think so, but you could get s trabslation that still keeps the rhythm, rhyming (even though the exact rhyme is different), and meaning. For example, there are multiple translations in spanish (Another latin-descended language) that achieve this.
>>25198279You can tell he’s joking, stop being a humourless pseud, it makes you look like a midwit. It’s /lit/, not a symposium.
>>25195896The Mountain Wreath > Paradife Loft
>>25199045Fortunately, I’m close to a Serb who could teach me the language. I will have to read it one day.
>le old is le good!
>>25199064Stick to Pynchon and video games
>>25199064Yeah bro everything created in the past ten years is better than everything created over the past thousand years.
>>25199060Based
when the first artist in a language coins the phrase, one would be presumptuous to try to better it. dante is impossible: "the hyena who writes poetry in tombs." if nabakov is depraved, what is dante, whose poetry is sublimated vengeance and repressed desire, other than exactly the manifestation of humbert that nabakov is condemning?
>>25199071>>25199077just kidding, anons. I love old stuff too.
>>25199100You’re okay, anon. Have you read Donne? I’m checking him out and he’s not actually far behind Shakespeare. He’s pretty brilliant.
